Confusion by Stefan Zweig Page B

let out what had been hanging over me for weeks like a thunderstorm. And while I found relief in that wild outbreak, I also felt boundless shame in giving so much of myself away to her.
    â€œWhat on earth is the matter? For God’s sake!” She had risen to her feet, astonished. But then she hurried up to me and led me from the table to the sofa. “Lie here and calm down.” She stroked my hands, she passed her own hands over my hair, while the aftermath of my spasms still shook my trembling body. “Don’t distress yourself, Roland—please don’t distress yourself. I know all about it, I could feel it coming.” She was still stroking my hair, but suddenly her voice grew hard. “I know just how he can confuse one, nobody knows better. But please believe me, I always wanted to warn you when I saw you leaning on him so much, on a man who can’t even support himself. You don’t know him, you’re blind. You are a child—you don’t know anything, or not yet, not today. Or perhaps today you have begun to understand something for the first time—in which case all the better for him and for you.”
    She remained bending over me in warm concern, and as if from vitreous depths I felt her words and the soothing touch of calming hands. It did me good to feel a breath of sympathy again at long, long last, and then to sense a woman’s tender, almost maternal hand so close once more. Perhaps I had gone without that too long as well, and now that I felt, through the veils of my distress, a tenderly concerned woman’s sympathy, some comfort came over me in the midst of my pain. But oh, how ashamed I was, how ashamed of that treacherous fit in which I had let out my despair! And it was against my will that, sitting up with difficulty, I brought it all out again in a rushing, stammering flood of words, all he had done to me—how he had rejected and persecuted me, then shown me kindness again, how he was harsh to me for no reason, no cause—a torturer, but one to whom ties of affection bound me, whom I hated even as I loved him and loved even as I hated him. Once more I began to work myself up to such a pitch that she had to soothe me again. Once more soft hands gently pressed me back on the ottoman from which I had jumped up in my agitation. At last I calmed down. She preserved a curiously thoughtful silence; I felt that she understood everything, perhaps even more than I did myself.
    For a few minutes this silence linked us. Then she stood up. “There—now you’ve been a child long enough; you must be a man again. Sit down at the table and have something to eat. Nothing tragic has happened—it was just a misunderstanding that will soon be cleared up.” And when I made some kind of protest, she added firmly, “It will soon be cleared up, because I’m not letting him play with you and confuse you like that any more. There must be an end to all this; he must finally learn to control himself. You’re too good for his dangerous games. I shall speak to him, trust me. But now come and have something to eat.”
    Ashamed and without any volition of my own, I let her lead me back to the table. She talked of unimportant matters with a certain rapid eagerness, and I was inwardly grateful to her for seeming to ignore my wild outburst and forgetting it again. Tomorrow, she said, was Sunday, and she was going for an outing on a nearby lake with a lecturer called W and his fiancée, I ought to come too, cheer myself up, take a rest from my books. All the malaise I felt, she said, just showed that I was overworking and my nerves were overstretched; once I was in the water swimming, or out on a walk, my body would soon regain its equilibrium.
    I said I would go. Anything but solitude now, anything but my room, anything but my thoughts circling in the dark. “And don’t stay in this afternoon either! Go for a stroll, take some exercise,